Lorcan reviews all BattleTech fiction in some semblance of publication order

[Lorcan Nagle]

OK, so here’s the deal.  I’m just about to finally complete my physical BattleTech fiction collection.  And I figured why not read them all? And if I’m gonna read them all, why not review them and post about it? I’ve read most BattleTech fiction that’s had a physical release at least once, many of them more than once.  And there’s a couple of more recent things I’ve never read or never finished.

In terms of scope, I’m gonna do novels, anthologies, Shrapnel, and books that have a high fiction content like the original Shrapnel, 25 years of Art and Fiction, and Legends.  I’ll try and keep to rough publication order but I’m going to be winging that. I might include the fiction from Technology of Destruction, but I’m probably not going to do the fiction in individual sourcebooks.  BattleCorps stuff that hasn’t been republished is right out because I’d like to be done in a reasonable amount of time.  I haven’t decided what I’ll do about the CGL novellas that haven’t gotten a physical release yet.  And I’ll probably maintain this going forward, we’ll see.

And so to begin with, let’s talk about The Sword and The Dagger.  Yes, I know it’s not the first BattleTech novel but it kinda sits alone in the line for a variety of reasons, not just the rights issues.

Plot: Feeling disillusioned with ruthless choices Hanse Davion has made as First Prince, Ardan Sortek requests a transfer from New Avalon to the task force heading to retake Stein’s Folly, a world recently lost to House Liao.  During the battle he’s shot out of his ’Mech, captured by Liao forces and while in a military hospital, finds a double of Hanse, and has to try and convince basically anyone of what he saw and that there's a danger to the Federated Suns

It’s very interesting to compare and contrast this book with Decision at Thunder Rift.  Both suffer from what TV Tropes call Early Installment Weirdness on account of being the first two novels.  This one is closer in terms of attention to detail but it all off in terms of getting BattleTech, it feels more like a fantasy RPG tie-in novel that’s been wedged into BattleTech’s milieu as opposed to dancing on the line between military SF and Space Opera. Some of it is the character names which are more in the vein of made-up SF/F ones instead of real-world ones (though amusingly, there’s a character named Rem in a couple of chapters), part of it is how the characters move around, even things like Ardan, Ran Felsner and Lees Hamman (a character only seen in this novel) are just assigned command of each of the three regiments in the assault on Stein’s Folly.  Lees, presumably a MechWarrior also commands the mission to rescue Ardan from the military hospital, which is just him and a single squad of troopers who have to steal transport from the base.  And there’s some similar moments in other novels (like a couple of times in Heir to the Dragon which is a personal favourite), it just feels off here, the characters come off as epic heroes rather than military officers, they flit around the Inner Sphere like it’s nothing, they go wherever they want with minimal problems.  It’s well outside the wheelhouse of how the other novels would rapidly establish the feel of BattleTech.  There’s a lot of detail that’s overlooked as well, like we never get specifics on what actions Hanse has taken that Ardan feels are unbecoming of him, and at the end when the plot has been unraveled there’s a lot of “they did this by means that we have now blocked” and we never learn either side of this. Interestingly in the middle of the book there’s a scene where Hanse Davion is visited by a messenger who drops into a trance to give him detailed information, and it’s got quite a Dune vibe to it.  It’s been ages since I read the books so I don’t remember if it happens in there, but it very much reminded me of the bit in the first Villeneuve movie where Thufir recites the cost of the Imperial delegation to Caladan.

I’ve been very negative but there’s some positives too. The character work is solid enough for what the story is.  Most of it is from Ardan’s point of view and he’s a likable and well-rounded character  And I quite like the opening couple of chapters showing the fall of Stein’s Folly, especially using Uchita Tucker, one of the notable Thrush pilots from TRO:3025 as a character, probably the only time that’s happened in a novel.

Part of why I wanted to get this out of the way is that I quite like the rest of the 3025-era books, so I’ve got a clear run of quality until I hit, like Main Event in a couple of months.  But for now I move on to the Gray Death Legion Trilogy, starting with Decision at Thunder Rift.

[The Brant]

Nice, I'm doing the same thing minus the reviewing part. I've been updating my progress at https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=86294.0

[Lorcan Nagle]

Onwards and upwards, here’s Decision at Thunder Rift.

Plot: Grayson Death Carlyle is the heir to a mercenary ’Mech lance stationed on the backwater world of Trellwan.  When the lance is betrayed and he narrowly escapes with his life, he has to muster all his skills to stay alive and avenge his father’s death.

Well, if The Sword and the Dagger is The Man in the Iron Mask, this is very much Dune.  Or at least the plot of Dune without all the politics and social commentary and stuff. Like, try and tell me Griff, Ari and Rivera aren’t basically Gurney/Duncan, Thufir and Yueh.  Griff especially is a musical instrument short of being Gurney Halleck, facial scar and hatred for a traditional foe and all.  Anyway Grayson is our Paul stand-in, losing his privileged position, his family, his life, and builds everything up again while overthrowing a corrupt noble.  Both books dip into the Plentary Romance genre as well, Trellwan is as vital to the setting as Arrakis is to Dune with the planet’s skewed day/night cycle and meteorological patterns playing a part in the events of the story. It’s not one-for-one, of course, but the broad plot beats are there. And that’s fine, it’s a classic plot and the quality of the writing is what sells it or not.

Thankfully the writing here is pretty good! The plot moves at a good pace, it doesn’t stick around anywhere for long, Grayson moves or is moved from setpiece to setpiece, learning something,, achieving a goal or getting a new one.  I think the status quo changes every other chapter! The action is enjoyable, I think the sequence where he takes control of the militia and ends up chasing the Locust through Sarghad is still one of the best in the entire line, and even when some elements jar when compared to the game or to later entries in the fiction - like the overwhelming odds that the Trellwan Lancers’ mechs stand up to without being absolutely pasted, or the vague suggestions that the Kuritan JumpShips are armed to the teeth, but they’re largely forgivable.

Characterisation is decent as well.  The story mostly spends time in Grayson’s head so the gradual shift in the priorities and motivations, culminating in abandoning his quest for revenge to protect his comrades is very believable.  Lori gets a bit of short shrift, like we maybe needed one more chapter exploring her feelings towards Grayson early on, but overall she’s handled well, especially towards the end where she’s a bit distant from Grayson for understandable if not entirely reasonable reasons.
Overall I still enjoyed this one, it’s the kind of thing that would work well as a BattleTech movie because it uses a lot of the tropes of the setting, especially around the characters being pawns in a broader plot, and it has a nice tight scope.  You don’t need to explain a whole bunch, there’s enough happening to draw the audience in, and there’s some good potential for action setpieces. 

I've started reading Mercenary's Star, but the review might be a bit later as I have a deadline looming.

[Moonsword]

Chucking this into the Novel and Sourcebook Reviews board.

[helloCLD]

Excited to follow along with this. I'm also working my way through the novels in (mostly) publication order and collecting print editions, except this is my first time reading them.

[Lorcan Nagle]

And so, we move to Mercenary’s Star.

Plot: The Gray Death Legion has made it to Galatea and are desperate for work, so they sign on with a rebel group on the world of Verthandi, taken from Steiner by Kurita ten years prior.  Nominally there to train up the local fighters, they wind up trapped on the world and end up taking a far more active role in the fighting.

This is very much one of the prototypical BattleTech stories, which has been repeated in the novel lines - DRT for example, and is the kind of thing that makes for a fun and fraught tabletop campaign or RPG.  Keith executes it quite well, but interestingly it’s something of a departure in terms of tone and pace from Decision at Thunder Rift. In the prior novel, Grayson is almost always on the backfoot, but here he’s in control, both by virtue of having a somewhat decent-sized merc unit that’s loyal to him at his back, and because here he’s pitting his wits against an enemy leader who’s known to him compared to him not even knowing the extent of the plot on Trellwan until the last act of the story.  As a result the novel isn’t as breathless as Decision at Thunder Rift was, and Grayson spends a lot of it in control of the situation.  There are setbacks, most notably a scene I really like when the rebel base is attacked by DEST troopers but for the most part we're seeing the gradual victory of the Legion over the Kuritan forces.

This gets a bit rote, sadly and the book descends into a routine where every 2-3 chapters consists of an action scene, an event that moves the plot forward a bit, and maybe a bit of character introspection or development.

On that note, the Kuritans here are more villains than antagonists.  Duke Ricol, who only has a brief appearance here is one of those cool manipulator types and is clearly set up to be Grayson’s opposite number and in Decision at Thunder Rift Singh was more of a lackey executing Ricol’s plan.  Governor-General Nagumo by comparison is a moustache-twirling villain –  literally at points! – who’s first appearance in the novel involves threatening mass executions.  His chief interrogator Dr. Vlade is a swastika and a goosestep away from being ripped out of a cheesy WWII exploitation movie, and even the bloodthirsty Nagumo finds him a bit much, while Colonel Kevlavic, the commanding MechWarrior is the kind of person who revels in murdering civilians with his Marauder, being introduced laying a town to waste. To amp up the Kuritan villany there’s people being taken as slaves, including the implication that female prisoners will be sold to brothels and the sexual manipulation of one character in order to get information out of her.  It’s all a bit grimy and while I’m not arguing that BattleTech shouldn’t or can’t touch on these themes, it is worth noting that all these elements add up to making the Kuritans feel over the top in terms of villainy

We’re also still a bit in Early Installment Weirdness, with the Kuritan soldiers still having English-language ranks. By the time we return to the Combine in Wolves on the Border, the Japanese ranks will have been established. But Keith has gotten a copy of TRO 3025 at least so there’s a much broader selection of ’Mechs,DropShips aren’t intermittently called shuttles and get referred to by class, we’ve got aerospace fighters on the go… but interestingly no assault ’Mechs show up, the most fearsome units in the battles are Archers, Marauders, and Warhammers, which is interesting because relatively few authors will hew to the whole idea of assaults being very rare.  At the same time though there’s still references to “warships” as part of JumpShip fleets, and Verthandi somehow rates a garrison of 4 ’Mech regiments. Amusingly, it’s also the first instance of armed IndustrialMechs in the fiction, almost 20 years before MechWarrior Dark Age.

The novel expands the Legion’s membership as well, which means that the existing characters get lost in the shuffle a bit.  Lori gets a fair bit to do, mostly centred around her trauma following being hit by an Inferno round near the end of Decision at Thunder Rift; Captain Tor has a chapter to himself as he tries to get support for the Legion back on Galatea; while Ramage trainstroops and leads a bunch of infantry actions in gruff Master Sergeant mode. The new cast have a few moments in which to shine, Davis McCall stands out with his exuberant attitude and cod Scottish speech patterns, Hassan Khaled gets a bit of time early on but fades away due to being sidelined in the action, Delmar Clay is basically there in the fight scenes and has a few lines, his laconic attitude more informed than present in the text, and the tand-out is probably Isle Martinez, the captain of the DropShip Phobos who learns to respect Grayson’s audacious out of the box thinking. A stand-out moment for the cast is actually the very last page of the book as the Legion prepare to take off to find their next job, and Grayson, Lori and Ramage walk up the DropShip ramp together.  It’s a small thing but it feels earned, that these three have been through so much and it’s brought them together.

Overall this is another enjoyable novel and the fiction line is very much starting to gain the definition of what makes a BattleTech story – not just the mech action but the vibe of the universe, the interaction between people in power and soldiers, the scale and intensity, the way the fate of a whole world can balance on the actions of a person or a small group of people.  And it’s just in time for the first novel to show that the status quo can and will change.  The Price of Glory is next.

[Lorcan Nagle]

Finishing up with the Gray Death Legion for now, let’s move on to The Price of Glory.

Plot: The Legion finds themselves embroiled in a plot concocted by a corrupt Marik duke and a ComStar Precentor for a prize of unimaginable value, and end up turning to an unlikely source for assistance.

We’re back in prototypical BattleTech plot country here, with the other perennial fave for mercenary stories: betrayed by their employer.  The Legion are simple patsies here, set up because they had the bad luck to be granted that particular part of Helm as their landhold instead of being targeted by a vengeful noble out for revenge or otherwise a necessary cog in an elaborate scheme, it’s just bad luck that it’s Grayson Carlyle and his troops that get caught in the firing line, first for the Legion and then for the conspirators.

We are, of course, still very early in the novel series and we’re still getting firsts here.  My copy of the novel is the RoC reprint from the 90s, so I can’t say for sure about the FASA original, but my copy doesn’t have the epigraphs at a start of a chapter giving the location and date, and so when it’s mentioned that the year is 3027 early in the book it’s our first indicator that time has progressed from the background material of the 2nd edition box set. We’re also told it’s been 4 years since Decision at Thunder Rift, dating that to 3023.  It’s the first appearance of ComStar in fiction and they’re already off to the scheming and controlling the flow of information and knowledge. And of course, this book sees the recovery of a Star league memory core, the first small hint that the setting can and will change radically. 

The plotting here is different again from the prior two novels.  Where Decision at Thunder Rift was breathless with Grayson moving from crisis to crisis, and Mercenary’s Star had him more in control but punctuated the plot with many small action scenes, here we only have a couple of large setpiece battles, most notably the fighting around the DropShips and the three passes the Legion defends while trying to buy time to escape Nagayan Mountain. Grayson is on the back foot for about half the book in terms of not knowing what’s going on, but he’s a lot more proactive around defending the Legion and figuring out the problem when he does get clued in.  It’s a side effect of, well, having a small force of BattleMechs and troopers at his command as opposed to being a kid in over his head, but it’s also a good way to show his maturation and growing into the role of a Mercenary commander.  It’s also concentrated nicely by his hesitation and fears both in dialogue and exposition, he’s uncomfortable being a colonel at 24 even if the Legion is really a regiment on paper only.  In terms of figuring out the plot I want to call out the nice little moment where they’re trying to figure out why everything feels off during the truce with the Marik forces, and when they come to the conclusion they’re being treated like outlaws works very well. One thing stands out for me is that Grayson gets to be smart and figure stuff out without having all the information so there’s still stuff to learn and he can still be on the backfoot.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve got a nice turnaround on Grayson’s expected arc.  Like you’d expect him to eventually square off against Duke Ricol and get revenge for his father’s death, and we’re told that his desire for revenge has cooled over the years, but at the same time learning that Ricol has been spying on him and is coming to Helm to help Grayson, it brings a kind of closure to the arc of sorts, and Grayson seems OK with letting go and dedicating himself to the Legion and then his family.

The book continues to have issues juggling the cast.  Ramage gets more to do here than in either of the prior books, I quite enjoyed his segment of the fighting around the DropShip, culminating in him taking control of a Locust at a pivotal moment, though he’s effectively written out of the book after that.  Most of the rest of the cast get little moments here and there, most notably in a single chapter about two thirds of the way through the book where Delmar Clay and Davis McCall get a two-header, introduces Tracy Maxwell Kent, It’s kinda explained what happened to Janice Taylor and Grayson’s semi-romance in Mercenary’s Star, and so on. Lori fares a bit better but is stuck supporting Grayson for the most part instead of getting her own plotline.

Overall it’s another enjoyable one for me. It’s a more contemplative story than the last two and has a bit more going on than just the Legion leading a rebellion, and continues to build up the universe’s core tropes and mores. 

While I’m moving away from the Legion for a bit, this doesn’t represent the end of their Succession Wars exploits.  Way later down the line there’s the recent novel Rock and a Hard Place, but much sooner than that there’s a short story featuring them in the original Shrapnel anthology called Legion Team.  But those are stories for another day.  Next up is one of the most critically acclaimed BattleTech novels, and my personal favourite: Wolves on the Border.

[Lorcan Nagle]

As the seasons change, we begin and end Wolves on the Border.

Plot: Minobu Tetsuhara is a loyal samurai of House Kurita, but he has been living in disgrace ever since he allowed a member of Wolf’s Dragoons to withdraw from battle two years prior.  Now the Dragoons have taken a contract with the Draconis Combine and Minobu is to be their liaison officer.  His relationship with the Dragoons and with Jamie Wolf will end up testing Minobu’s precepts of bushido and the balance of duty and honour in his life.

As I mentioned last time, this has long been my favourite BattleTech novel, but it’s been many years since I read it and I’m glad to say it holds up, but on this reread it’s interesting to see the timeline of events and how the plot twists and unfolds.  While on one level I knew the novel took place over a period of five years and jumps around a lot, my memory had meshed events together differently or I had separated them out.  For instance, I had forgotten how much space the initial action on Quentin takes up, it’s almost a quarter of the total page count.  I’d separated out the sequence where a member of the Ryuken has to evade a Davion lance, her morale bolstered by Minobu calling her a samurai from the one where members of the Dragoons make a daring raid along a river bed, only to be ambushed by the Eridani Light Horse, only to be reminded they’re in the same battle, and it’s the same one where Minobu is grievously injured by sabotage. Or that the chapter where Minobu’s wife Tomiko is introduced to Jamie’s partner Marisha is right beside one where they’re fast friends a year later. Similarly my memory had Dechan Fraser playing a larger role in the story but he really fades in and out, mostly there to have a Dragoon point of view character, but one still enough of an outsider to be unfamiliar with what happens in that scene.

It’s a sign of the quality of writing on display that these scenes, basically a collection of vignettes, work so well.  Minobu and Jamie’s relationship is basically a sketch, they spend very little of the novel in each other’s company but the strength of their bond shines through and makes the end of the book such a fine tragedy. It feels like Dechan matures across his appearances, especially his last POV moment on An Ting where his spirits are raised more by camaraderie and a sense of belonging rather than satisfaction at killing Jerry Akuma or the prospects of more revenge. I feel like more could have been done with Michi Noketsuna to set up his more hard-edged later appearances, but I had forgotten the moment where he kills Elijah Satoh, the Ryuken’s temporary commander on Barlow’s End so there’s at least a hint of the man he would become. And speaking of Jerry Akuma, I feel he’s the best antagonist BattleTech has served up to date.  A great example of the smug snake archetype, he’s always manipulating, always knows the right thing to say to antagonise or confound his enemies, but he’s also got huge blind spots due to his arrogance that lead to his downfall, which makes it all the more satisfying.  He’s very dangerous even as he underestimates the Dragoons in fundamental ways and it’s the kind of thing that BattleTech fiction often strives to but doesn’t always achieve.

The other major strength compared to the novels that came out before and around this one is that Charette is a bit more of a literary writer than Stackpole, Keith or Meyhar. Tie-in SF is a ghetto of a ghetto in publishing, and the writing therein is generally workmanlike. This is more an observation than a criticism, I struggle to write prose at all! Meanwhile Charette weaves in repeated motifs to symbolise change, most notably the comparison between Minobu being distracted by his brother while painting a vase at the very start of the book and him able to ignore Tomiko calling him while practicing with a bow in the first chapter after he pilots a ’Mech for the first time in years on Quentin. But even beyond using the same basic scene to illustrate the change in Minobu’s demeanour, in the first iteration he’s engaging in a peaceful hobby, and in the second a martial one, indicating his transition back to the life of the warrior. It’s not Joyce by any means but it still rises above the standard SF action potboiler fare. A more subtle one is the time of year, Minobu notes at the end that so many of the pivotal events take place in Autumn, the season of change, which he always loved.  It’s a nice reminder that his life was always a two-edged sword, being a samurai meant his life was always in Takashi Kurita’s hands and it doomed him as much as it enabled him.

And this all leads inexorably to the battle of Misery, and then to Minobu’s death by his own hand.  It’s seldom that a novel emotionally affects me, but this one always does. It’s Minobu’s calm and focus on his last steps, despite Jaime’s desperate attempts to change his mind. It’s the conversation between Jaime and Michi when the former realises what it means to be kaishaku-nin, and it’s the inexorable events that spin out of this personal moment.  Sadly many of these aren’t in a novel but rather in sourcebooks. But that leads to one of the most interesting parts of this book, the level of integration into the rest of the product line.

So, the second BattleTech product I got was the Wolf’s Dragoons sourcebook, and as a result it’s one of the things that was a formative part of my experience with the game and when I read Wolves on the Border a few years later, I recognised a bunch of character names and events from the sourcebook.  It means I also knew that as mauled as the Dragoons were on Misery they’d face much worse on Crossing, Harrow’s Sun, Wapakoneta and Glenmora. Similarly the epilogue is shown from Dan Allard’s point of view in Warrior: Riposte (published a few months before this novel but I decided to reread Wolves first so I can go straight through the Warrior Trilogy).  There are references to scenarios in Tales of The Black Widow and The Fox’s Teeth. And of course there’s that scene, the first use of Clan language.  Without the context of Lethal Heritage it’s mysterious and suggests the Dragoons come from some heavily divergent culture culture as opposed to just being people from the Periphery who lucked into a large cache of equipment, and it gives observant readers a chance to twig where the Dragoons are from before Lethal Heritage’s cliffhanger.

And with that we move onto the next cornerstone of the BattleTech idiom: the novel of sweeping political changes, usually written by Mike Stackpole.  Warrior: En Garde is on the docket, and ready to be exiled to Solaris VII

[Lorcan Nagle]

Let the great game begin, it’s Warrior: En Garde.

Plot: Immediately after suffering a crippling injury in a battle Federated Suns MechWarrior Justin Xiang Allard is drummed out of the AFFS on trumped-up charges, exiled to Solaris and begins fighting in the Games, dedicating his victories to House Liao. Taksahi Kurita tasks his disgraced cousin Yorinaga with forming a unit to hunt down and kill the Kell Hounds, both the source of Yorinaga’s disgrace and the unit in which Justin’s half-brother Dan serves.  Melissa Steiner plans a covert trip to the Federated Suns to visit her husband-to-be. As these disparate plots intertwine, ComStar’s First Circuit sits in the background observing and manipulating events.

I think we’re onto our last formative BattleTech text here, the sprawling epic with a cast of thousands that upends the setting to some degree.  En Garde doesn’t do that much upending, but it’s really setting up the rest of the trilogy. We’ve got plot elements in four of the five Successor States, the Free Worlds League is already the ugly stepchild of the setting and the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth are comfortably occupying the protagonist factions at this point, with the Draconis Combine starting to move from antagonist to deuteragonist. 

The plot itself is a good mix of self-contained action and laying down plots to continue into the rest of the trilogy, Justin goes from disgraced MechWarrior to Solaris Champion to Capellan spymaster, the Kell Hounds escape Kuritan predation at a cost, and Yorinaga Kurita is still out there coming for them, and Melissa avoids capture.  The setup is more on the lines of the Steiner-Davion wedding looming large as opposed to clear next steps, but the characters will all weave in and out of that event in the next novel. Between this being Stackpole’s first published novel and the ultra-tight deadlines he was under, it’s pretty impressive that everything comes together as well as it does, and there are some threads in here that won’t pay off until the end of the trilogy, like setting up Jeana Clay as Melissa’s double.
There are, however issues with the plotting at points where he wants a thing to happen in a specific way, and eventually just says “screw it”, and it happens.  Like in the Kell Hounds subplot there’s a whole thing about wanting to muster out a Lyran tech a day early so he can catch a DropShip home, and the eventual solution is to alter the calendar to move a Terran day forward, which in turn messes up the timetable for the remaining Kuritan forces to attack the Hounds when their reinforcements arrive.  And this is a well-telegraphed plot point, one of the first things the characters talk about is how to help this guy and it’s at least a hundred pages before they hit on the solution, so it’s integrated into the story well enough – except that it’s never explained how they do it, or if there are knock-on effects for the locals.  Or that the Kuritans don’t ever ask why their computers are showing the wrong day or checking the timetable for their reinforcements before rushing to attack. Similarly on Solaris Kym Sorenson discovers that Gray Noton is the person who crippled Justin when he says “Not again, not the same trick I used on you, I should have just killed you!” out loud while they watch Justin fight Billy Wolfson in the arenas. And OK, maybe Noton said that so he could in turn confirm she was a Davion spy, but the text doesn’t confirm this, in fact Quintus Allard suggests Noton revealed Kym to keep his involvement in Justin’s injury hidden – though of course he already knew about it.

Some of Stackpole’s particular writing tics are already on display as well.  Like his characters are very good at executing plans perfectly, manipulating their enemies into making mistakes, or when things go wrong they’re able to react and resolve the problem quickly in an action sequence.  Along those lines there’s a very yikes moment when the Kell Hounds first engage the Kuritan forces where Patrick Kell says that Kuritans favour the number five, so if they take down five units in their first salvo it’ll rattle them.  And these guys are meant to be the 2nd Sword of light, one of the most fearsome regiments in the Inner Sphere! Imagine if there’s a line about Davions thinking the number thirteen is unlucky so if we attack the Davion Assault Guards with that many mechs they’ll be unnerved. It’s doubly galling when he’s talked about how one of the roots of Justin’s arc, facing discrimination and outright racism from fellow Davions, was inspired by Stackpole witnessing anti-Catholic bigotry as a child. Similarly on the overcoming prejudice front Clovis Holstein calls attention to being a dwarf in his dialogue all the time and while Stackpole is clearly being well-intentioned here in terms of having a character with a physical impairment that doesn’t prevent him from being a valuable member of the cast, but the way it’s handled is pretty heavy-handed at times.

Moments like that pass by quickly and this is one of Stackpole’s great strengths, he’s great at pacing a story and keeping the action going.  With the Warrior Trilogy part of that is very short chapters and constantly shifting perspectives.  There’s also some interestingly prescient moments filtered through 80s futurism, my favourite is the description of what happens to “Joana Baker’s” – Melissa Steiner’s assumed identity for her journey to the Federated Suns – data when she books her DropShip ticket.  It’s analysed and parsed and her cabin and prospective activities on the ship are all generated based on her preferences cross-referenced against other passengers.  Not too different to how our preferences and data are fed into algorithms today, right?  Except that in this case each company has a central computer instead of it being across a distributed network or farmed out to third parties, but hey, it’s not like Stackpole’s a futurist or an economist, getting ahead of a trend in data processing that definitely wasn’t as much of a thing in 1987 is impressive in and of itself.

We’ve also got early moments of Stackpole’s wry sense of humour, which can be hit and miss but when it hits, it’s great.  A moment I’m usually amused by is when Yorinaga Kurita shows up in kendo gear and hands his XO a note saying their ISF handler has died in a kendo accident.  The XO says this is a tragedy and asks if he should send this out immediately, but Yorinaga shakes his head and then the ISF officer walks in, also in kendo gear asking Yorinaga if he’s ready for their match.

There’s a lot of impressive world-building in here for BattleTech overall.  Most notably a huge amount of Solaris City is laid out, we get the notion of it as a Berline or Tangier-style treaty city carved up into zones, the names of Cathay and the Black Hills as the Capellan and Davion ones, the names and styles of most of the major arenas, Thor’s Shieldhall and Valhalla as an iconic nightspot, all details that would be maintained and expanded on in later Solaris VII-centred game products. Stackpole’s done his homework on the setting as well, with the delicate nature of JumpShips becoming a plot point late in the book after Melissa’s DropShip is hijacked.

Overall I did enjoy this on the reread, especially considering how early in Stackpole’s career it comes.  It’s got some rough moments, some of which he’d improve on over the years,others will become running parts of his style for good or ill.  But this novel is the start of his indelible mark on BattleTech. And speaking of which we’re off to war next in Warrior: Riposte.

[Lorcan Nagle]

Thus begins the curbstomping of the Capellan Confederation in Warrior: Riposte.

Plot: Dan Allard travels to Zaniah to tell Morgan Kell his brother is dead and Yorinaga Kurita has returned. Justin Xiang has been installed on Sian as a senior Maskirova analyst and must navigate the cutthroat court politics of House Liao. And Hanse Davion’s impending marriage to Melissa Steiner has been made public, their wedding on Terra looms large over the Inner Sphere.

The Warrior Trilogy continues to introduce and in doing so define repeated motifs, tropes and plot elements for BattleTech fiction overall.  The first one is the idea of the big social event in characters plot and manoeuvre for power, as evidenced by both the new years’ party on Tharkad and more grandly, Hanse Davion’s marriage to Melissa Steiner.  I want to talk about the former to begin with, as it has a bunch of elements that don’t appear in the latter. 

Most notably, there’s a recurring theme in fiction, especially American fiction around the plain-talking working class person getting the better of their notional societal betters.  At the time these books were being written and published, it was perhaps best known through the genre of “slobs vs snobs” bawdy comedies like Caddyshack and Police Academy, and here it’s generally expressed by battles of wits between the valiant Warrior and the venal Politician.  These aren’t literal titles, the Warrior can often be a leader of worlds and by literal definition a politician but their role in the story is more the Warrior - Hanse Davion is a Warrior, Aldo Lestrade is a Politician - and the story makes it clear that the actions Warriors take against politicians are morally justified.  Morgan Kell uses the verigrpahed note that lets him do anything he wants to torture the master of ceremonies at the party on Tharkad by insisting on full titles, he’s described as smiling cruelly both here and later when he jousts verbally with Aldo Lestrade and his companions. Last time I checked, cruelty is generally not considered a virtue and yet Morgan is depicted as the virtuous one in these encounters.  Well, the master of ceremonies is more depicted as someone who doesn’t like his feathers ruffled and Morgan is very much ruffling feathers, but it’s portrayed as comedy with wisps of the emcee’s thinning hair going flying.  This is a trope that will manifest itself time and again in different ways across BattleTech fiction in the following decades. Victor Davion is frustrated by the pomp and circumstance he’s expected to endure as Archon Prince, scheming nobles will call for soldiers to act against their honour.  Even in the Clans, we’ll see Khans who fit the amoral schemer archetype, frustrating more noble warriors under their command, and we hope to see their comeuppance.

The wedding introduces another kind of setpiece that’s used more sparingly in BattleTech but is still important, namely a bunch of leaders get in a room together and intrigue happens.  In and around the actual wedding with the bombshell announcement of the war, we’ve got Jaime Wolf and Takashi Kurita’s confrontation with a bit more context to surrounding events, we’ve got the discovery of ComStar’s hidden BattleMech army, the assassination attempt on Quintus Allard and the mystery of who thwarted it and the drama that surrounds those events.  I feel that last point is a bit of a missed opportunity, where Dan finds Quintus alone in his apartment with a drink of whiskey poured out and he instantly suspects someone else was there.  A chapter later it's casually dropped that Alexi Malenkov is a Davion spy and when next we see him he’s stinking of booze so it almost becomes an open and shut thing, you’re clearly lead to believe that Alexi met Quintus, but we don’t get another reference to him being a spy until well into the next novel so it’s fallen by the wayside, and as we’ll later learn, there’s more going on here.  Oh yeah, and war were declared. 

It’s actually a pretty good move to end a chapter on that front and then have the next page be the title for book 4 (as in the novel’s internal division into “books” that represent discrete movements inside the plot as opposed to it being the title of a novel that doesn’t exist).  The war doesn’t actually take up a lot of space in the story, and what’s here is primarily from the perspective of Andy Redburn who’s engaged in a lot of derring-do, outmanoeuvring and out-thinking his opponents. This can be cool, the sequence of him bluffing a company of Marauders into surrendering is a nice moment, but the Capellans get no victories on-page here and this would be an issue that rears its head in Battletech fiction a lot, where one side is the designated winner and the other side can’t get a break. In this case it’s hammered home because the Kuritans get to maul the forces on Northwind on-page before being forced to retreat, assisted by having important members of the cast there in the shape of Yorinaga Kurita and Akira Brahe.  The Kuritans are allowed to be dangerous while the Liao forces are less so, looping back into the noble Warrior and the venal Politician dichotomy I talked about earlier. This is by no means unique to BattleTech, it’s something I’ve seen pop up a lot in military SF and space opera, and like, I get that it’s more expedient to show a couple of battles to illustrate the flow of the war, but when they’re all one-sided it’s less dramatically satisfying regardless of the outcome.

The last element that happens here for the first time is the summary death of a notable character.  I won’t call Michael Hasek-Davion a main character by any stretch of the term, but he’s been in three of the nine novels published to this point and mentioned in another one.  He’s was the first state-level leader who wasn’t an actual head of state to be in a novel, and it wasn’t until the Warrior Trilogy that we’d see more (even if you count Kurita’s Warlords, Wolves on the Border was published after En Garde, so Aldo Lestrade’s appearance there predates them) so it’s quite an important moment when he’s killed, especially when it’s a summary execution as he attempts to scheme.  It sets stakes for the ongoing story, and it reinforces the Warrior vs Politician divide yet again.  Max Liao orders Michael’s death, but it’s Justin Xiang, the Warrior in his court who pulls the trigger and like all the Sian chapters, it’s primarily from Justin’s point of view, we’re in his head as he takes action.  The Politician’s venal actions see him laid low at the Warrior’s hand, and while both the Liao and Michael are antagonists in the story, either’s death is to a degree a victory for House Davion. By comparison Justin and Hanse Davion are closer to opponents at this point, both are shown to have their virtues while Max Liao and Michael Hasek-Davion are largely without virtue.

It’s interesting that as a second book in a trilogy, we’re not doing, say, the Campbellian heroes’ journey where the revelation/abyss happens and drives the characters to the lowest point or the rising action/complication stage of a three or five act story.  Everything’s going pretty good for House Davion, and Justin is largely isolated from the devastation being wrought on the Capellan Confederation as he hatches a plan that will apparently destroy the Federated Suns.  The book is more interested in pulling you along as it shows you principal events in the buildup and execution of the Fourth Succession War as opposed to being a self-contained drama.  This has advantages and disadvantages depending on how much you enjoy the story as presented.  I mostly like it though, so it’s time to move on to the conclusion of the war and a lot of tears and bloodshed in Warrior: Coupe.

[Caesar Steiner for Archon]

Morgan Kell uses the verigrpahed note that lets him do anything he wants to torture the master of ceremonies at the party on Tharkad by insisting on full titles, he’s described as smiling cruelly both here and later when he jousts verbally with Aldo Lestrade and his companions.

This also should have been a faux pas on Morgan's part, since, unbeknownst to Morgan that sort of peacocking was how people signaled their allegiance to Frederick over Katrina at the time. Without knowing it, he was doing the BattleTech version of putting on an NWO t-shirt. I wish I could have seen that version of the scene, where Morgan is surrounded by his enemies and he doesn't get why they're all acting like they've just become best friends.

[Lorcan Nagle]

War, huh! What is is good for?  Apparently book sales! Well, I bought Warrior: Coupe second-hand so I‘m not complicit in Davion war crimes?

Plot: the Fourth Succession War rages on and against this backdrop plans and schemes come to fruition: Morgan Kell and Yorinaga Kurita circle each other, waiting for their final battle; Aldo Lestrade attempts to undermine the Steiner-Davion alliance by means of assassination; Justin Xiang sets his sights on a Davion research facility and ComStar makes moves out of the darkness to try and curtail House Davion’s massive gains.

Hanse Davion is not full of shit, and House Liao never stood a chance.

To address the first point, it’s kinda interesting at the start when Hanse lies to the press conference about Michael Hasek-Davion’s death, and tells Morgan Hasek-Davion a different lie, but we learn through internal monologue that he’s done both to protect the people and Morgan from a painful truth.  All the nice things Hanse says and does are genuine and not an attempt to cynically manipulate people, he even talks about this with Morgan later in the book that when he and Michael vied for the throne Michael expected Hanse to be more of a skilled politician and to have a Dune-level wheels within wheels approach to their conflict.  Indeed Hanse regrets many of the underhanded things he has to do like planting a spy in Morgan’s bed.  But it’s OK because she falls in love with him and quits the MIIO to be with him!  It’s a problem with having the rulers of the Successor States as characters in the fiction, they need to be at least sympathetic to some degree and as a result it’s harder to have them as the aloof, detached rulers of hundreds of worlds and billions of people who can order a regiment to their deaths on a whim. If Hanse doesn’t agonise over the decision to let the 5th Syrtis Fusiliers get in over their heads, then he seems like a monster and he’s one of the main characters in the novel, and one of the nominal “good guys” in the story.  We know from his internal monologues that he is this good person, that he feels the war is a necessary evil and that he’s saving the Capellan people from tyranny as much as he’s avenging himself on Maximillian Liao for the events of The Sword and the Dagger.

And you gotta feel bad for House Liao on some level.  Sure, the palace on Sian is a literal dysfunction junction, but between the general delusion on Max and Romano’s parts and the whole two out of the three main characters in that storyline not named Liao are Davion spies, they’re boned.  It’s not like I wanted them to win or anything, but at this point it feels like bullying.  The best they get is the near destruction of the Fifth Syrtis Fusiliers on Sarna and a not-terrible showing on Kathil, where it does feel like the Death Commandos would have succeeded in their mission if not for Morgan wading into them in an Atlas.  But even in those two situations Sarna falls and Kathil is saved so it doesn’t amount to much.

And on the note of the dysfunction junction on Sian, I’m starting to feel kinds of weird about Candace and Justin’s relationship.  It’s not bad per se, but when the story begins she’s full of anger, partially because of the limitations of her injury, which Justin helps her overcome through t’ai chi. And after that point, which coincides with them beginning their relationship, she starts to become the one voice of reason in House Liao to the point of having Justin drop a holodisk on Bethel with a message saying she’s amenable to terms of surrender and ultimately defecting with Justin and forming the St. Ives Compact.  There’s a very patriarchal or colonial element to it, that this outsider from a more advanced nation comes along and shows Candace how to improve her life through her own cultural heritage. It’s meant to be sympathetic for both characters, Justin is an outsider trying to find his place and Candace is isolated by her position and her anger so it works well to bring them together, it’s just the instigating action of that plot hasn’t aged all that well.

Similarly in the well intentioned but aging poorly category, we have Clovis Holstein mooning over a woman, and then the pair of them get stuck underground when the Draconis Combine attacks their settlement and during a tense moment he falls back into negative feelings about his appearance and size and all that.  Now, Karla, the object of his attention is at least able to push back on some of what he says in a reasonable way, especially when he’s positioned her as an object of desire rather than a person and she calls that out, but at this point in his career, I don’t feel that Stackpole is skilled enough to handle this kind of conversation with the nuance it requires.

A number of elements set up earlier in the books come to fruition here, showing that Stackpole’s skills as a plotter are already well-developed.  Jeana foils an assassination attempt on Melissa and Katrina Steiner - by virtue of her replacing Melissa so the assassins weren’t ready for her military skills or her familiarity with the Isle of Skye, betraying their origins.  She’s basically in the entire trilogy for this scene and to add some pathos to Dan Allard’s story, and it’s to Stackpole’s credit that he pulled that side of things off well.  We do have knock-on events from this, most notably Frederick Steiner’s attack on Dromini IV, culminating in the man being shot and eventually becoming Anastasius Focht. And at this point, we can be pretty sure the Clan Invasion was at least in the planning stages.  We’re past that scene in Wolves on the Border, and IIRC Lethal Heritage came out less than a year after Coupe. So it’s fair to assume that Stackpole was seeding plot points here for the next trilogy, like Anastasius Focht’s origins.  I assume this is at least some of the reasoning behind the ComStar scenes in all three books, which basically amount to Myndo Waterly yelling at Julian Tiepolo over and over until he dies of a heart attack, and then ordering the attack on the NAIS, which fails, and then she lifts the interdiction in exchange for allowing trops at HPGs.  It does a good job of setting Waterly up as a major antagonist, which comes to fruition in Heir to the Dragon and the Blood of Kerensky trilogy.  So I wonder how far ahead was Stackpole working?

One thing I’m definitely going to give Stackpole more credit for this time is Justin’s arc.  I’d convinced myself that his internal monologue had him ranting about wanting to avenge himself on Hanse Davion, and that his switching sides is a total out of nowhere moment, bu it’s actually not.  His monologue is almost always neutral, or when he thinks about the Davions it’s in reaction to their actions and not a judgement on them as people.  Similarly, when Tsen Shang shows up at the dinner between Justin, Candace and Alexi, there’s a moment where Justin says “do what you must” to Tsen, and in retrospect it’s clear he thinks he’s been caught out, not Alexi.  I feel it was probably a misstep to have both Aldo Lestrade and Justin hiding a laser inside their arms, so it’s less of a surprise moment when Justin uses his during the escape from the palace, and while the mystery of who shot the assassin in book 2 is solved, it’s done so in a perfunctory way, turns out it was Justin with his arm laser.

This volume is bookended with the last staple of Stackpole’s BattleTech books, the press conference or public statement where the leader announces or explains their actions.   It’s a bit overly dramatic for me at times - the one at the end of the book stands out for being this big to-do in a Cathedral and Morgan gets to announce that Melissa is pregnant.  In-universe it kinda makes sense because people love some pomp and circumstance, but the cynicism runs strong in me so they often get an eyeroll from me (see especially the heightened drama of the one in Grave Covenant)

Sadly, in all of this the Kell Hounds/Genoysha plot just putters along.  They do their thing, they eventually meet up, Morgan and Yorinaga recreate their duel and for the couple of pages of that scene, we get some good philosophy of what it means to be a warrior kinda stuff, the idea that Morgan realises the best thing to do is to refuse to fight is cool and the way he expresses it fits in well to the whole “we’ll become so fearsome nobody wants to fight us” ideal that’s all over the more recent Kell Hound origin fiction, but we have spent no time with him actually coming to this conclusion so it’s a bit undercooked. And Yorinaga’s seppuku scene sadly isn’t as emotionally effecting as Minobu Tetsuhara’s which isn’t a huge issue, except that if you were reading these books as they came out, it was the end of the immediately preceding novel.

And that’s the Warrior Trilogy done.  A bit of a mixed bag for me.  I enjoyed a lot of it, and while a lot of what I’ve talked about here is somewhat critical, the books work well overall.  Sure the Capellans never stood a chance in the way but a lot of the action of the war and especially the audacity of Morgan’s plan to raid Sian are still cool. I also find it pretty amusing that Pavel Ridzik almost intuits exactly why he’s been ordered to vacate a bunch of worlds in Tikonov but he’s killed before he can do anything to capitalise on it.The  fast pace largely works to the series favour as does the broad scope and the mixing of top-down intrigue and bottom-up action provides and epic sweep that actually works.  Next up is a book that literally spans decades.  It’s the life and times of Theodore Kurita, the Heir to the Dragon

[Scuttlefish]

This is a great idea for a thread

[Lorcan Nagle]

It’s time to return to the category of BattleTech novels I like a lot, with Heir to the Dragon.

Plot: Theodore Kurita navigates the road to power in the Draconis Combine, stopping off along the way in the Fourth Succession War and War of 3039.

This remains one of the more ambitious BattleTech novels in terms of scope.  Sure, there are many other books where the plot involves more worlds and the fate of more lives, but this is a throughline of decades in the life of one man.  Similarly to Wolves on the Border, there are often lengthy timeskips between chapters or segments of the book, and the initial action takes up more of the book than you might think, The Rasalhague assassination plot concludes on page 93 of my edition (the Roc reprint) with the 4th Succession War taking up about 80 pages and ending with Theodore’s side of his confrontation with Frederick Steiner, as seen in Warrior: Coupe. The book does a better job of noting the passage of time than Wolves on the Border did, primarily by having Theodore and Tomoe’s relationship and family grow and using that to ground the story. Their first two children are born between chapters and have sparse appearances in the text but they loom heavily in the narrative, as motivators for Theodore’s actions, as a contrast against his relationship with Takashi, and as markers for the passage of time.

A core theme of the book is very much the intertwining of parent-child relationships, how you can almost be trapped by destiny and on an inexorable path by decisions made when you were a child. Like, if Takashi hadn’t been as harsh and aloof with Theodore, then Theodore wouldn’t have been as rebellious, and he wouldn’t have married tomoe in secret, had children, and been more of a typical dad to them as we see in their handful of scenes together.  The circumstances are wildly different, of course, but you can see this contrast in the scene where Takashi shows Theodore his grandfather’s corpse to how Theodore plays with his son.  They both nominally want what is best for their children, just from very different standpoints. Theodore is very much closer to what we conventionally see as a good parent, even though his elder kids are largely raised by other people.

One thing the book wavers around on is Kuritan morality.  Early on, Theodore is aghast at the idea of his fiancée being executed for her father’s complicity in the assassination plot, but he’s also fine with luring Marcus Kurita to Luthien to kill him for his part, even though Takashi refuses to do so to maintain their dynasty.  Later on there’s a chapter in which Theodore justifies summarily shooting an officer, as seen in the Warrior Trilogy, which very much feels like Charette trying to keep Theodore as a sympathetic character in the face of an action that can be seen on the surface at least as callous.  And yet when his path crosses with Michi Noketsuna, he’s perfectly fine with Michi executing Panati while the man is unconscious once Michi justifies the action himself. I like the idea of Kuritan morality being alien to us, but Theodore explaining himself dilutes that a bit.  This ties in with one thing I was saying about humanising the House Lords and how that can make it harder for them to be these aloof rulers who can make a decision that affects billions of people. The book works to thread this line, where you’ve got people working to insulate leaders from the unpleasant things that must be done in their name - Subhash ordering Ninyu to kill Kathleen Palmer and her child once Theodore’s marriage to Tomoe and their children are legitimised, and Nasir Yezumi ordering Takashi’s assassination in Theodore’s name when he feels it’s time for Theodore to take the throne, and that works fairly well when combined with the aforementioned scene in which Takashi talks about how to some degree he’s trapped by the requirements of the office of Coordinator. Enacting the punishment he decreed on the plotters to Marcus and his family would wipe out a chunk of major members of the Kuritan establishment, therefore his culpability in the affair is scrubbed over.  It’s not addressed in the novel, but there’s a whole thing in the Draconis Combine that the Coordinator generally can’t been seen to use their power, and instead pass orders through functionaires or in abstract methods like haiku and it does fit onto the discussion of power in the book.

Plot wise, the book is very much two halves.  The first, covering Theodore from graduation to the Fourth Succession War feels a bit more solid and with a definite progression.  The second, basically from his appointment to Gunji-no-Kanrei onwards is more a series of short vignettes than a novel.  Each one being a couple of chapters, with a gap of years between them at times makes for more of a skip around.  Similarly a chunk of the cast from the first half almost disappears in the back, like Tomoe is in a handful of chapters after she and their children are presented to Takashi. At the same time though, is there enough material to expand?  A novel of just Theodore and Michi tooling around the Combine trying to convince the Yakuza to get on-side might get repetitive, maybe another chapter or two. It’s hard to decide if something in the book should be cut to add other material, to argue there’s enough to justify expanding the book another 100 pages, or splitting it in two.  With that criticism, there’s some nice moments in the back half, I quite liked having Kathleen Heany be a POV character for a chapter or two in the Fourth Succession War and then return for the War of 3039, or Michi Noketsuna and Dechan Fraser returning from Wolves in the Border, with the oft-mentioned but seldom seen Jeanette Rand in tow.

Overall a highly enjoyable read though, and one that’s up there with Wolves on the Border, if not reaching the same emotional highs… or lows but in a good way of its predecessor.  And that’s the original Succession Wars novels done with.  But I’m not quite ready to leave the era just yet, the Blood of Kerensky Trilogy will have to wait, because next is the original Shrapnel anthology.